Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Jacques Bedel (b. 1947), the artist and architect, was a regular participant in the CAYC’s group exhibitions ever since Escultura, follaje y ruidos (1970). He was also a member of the Grupo de los Trece from the time it was founded in late 1971. During that period, he moved away from the Kinetic ideas he had been exploring in the 1960s and started producing works that experimented with different materials and their interaction with physical phenomena.
This newsletter includes El Grupo de los Trece. Bienal de San Pablo, the article written by Glusberg and published immediately after the Buenos Aires based group’s prizewinning presentation at the biennial in Brazil. The large, thematically consistent installation for which Glusberg acted as curator, critic, and artist included individual works whose aesthetic had long identified the CAYC, on this occasion under the title Signos en ecosistemas artificiales.
In the 800 square meters assigned to them on the second floor of the biennial’s pavilion (Parque do Ibirapuera), in the section devoted to Uncatalogued Art, the CAYC members’ works were installed as part of a group presentation. According to Glusberg’s semiotic approach, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” did not apply in this case because (for man) all objects are signs. The critic sought to express the discursive-space concept in which each work functioned as a supportive component that contributed to the overall narrative.
In an essay titled “Libros, naturaleza y residuos arqueológicos” (Books, Nature, and Archeological Remains), Glusberg discusses Bedel’s 1977 series Las ciudades de plata. Bedel’s “sculptures” were books that contained models of mythical cities in the Americas that were never discovered by the conquistadores. They were ruins of a culture that had been preserved in a format that was designed to transmit culture: books.
For the first time, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations’ Grande Prêmio Itamaraty was awarded to a representative of Latin America. The presentation at the São Paulo Biennial recognized both the CAYC and the group for their submission and granted the CAYC a level of international prestige that far exceeded the acknowledgements it had received up to that point in time. In the months prior to the group’s joint participation in the XIV São Paulo Biennial, the CAYC organized solo exhibitions for some of the members of the Grupo de los Trece and promoted their works in its newsletters. (See GT-737 [doc. no. 1477389], GT-738 [doc. no. 1477390], GT-746 [doc. no. 1477396], GT-757 [doc. no. 1477397], GT-758 [doc. no. 1477398], GT-759 [doc. no. 1477399], GT-761 [doc. no. 1477419], GT-765 [doc. no. 1477432], GT-766 [doc. no. 1477433], GT-772 [doc. no. 1477435], GT-773 [doc. no. 1477436], GT-774-775 [doc. no. 1477437], GT-787 and GT-788 [doc. no. 1477450], GT-789 and 790 [doc. no. 1477452], GT-791-793 [doc. no. 1477454], GT-794-796 [doc. no. 1477457], GT-797-798 [doc. no. 1477460], GT-799 [doc. no. 1477462], and GT-800-801 [doc. no. 1477463]).
